The Flight Portfolio

by Julie Orringer

  They would eat their dinner, they would wash the plates together at the kitchen sink, they would read in the library or sit before the fire, poking logs into the stack on the grate and watching the heat flow through the embers. All their history lay between them, some of it exposed and other parts still shrouded; their present was the fire and their closeness, their future undiscussable. At some point, invariably, Grant’s hand fell upon Varian’s knee, or Varian pressed his forehead against Grant’s, his temples pounding. With speed they dispensed of shirts and trousers and all that lay beneath; then they took each other in hand. Every place he touched Grant, he felt his essential substance beneath the skin like metal, powerful and conductive.

  Afterward, they would have another drink and look at the night sky from the upstairs balcony. On fine nights they wore nothing but their dressing gowns; the closest neighbor was half a kilometer away. Twelve years after they’d learned the constellations from a book in Maine, they could still identify dozens. There was Orion with his drawn bow, Cassiopeia stretched on her rock, monstrous Cetus arching away from Perseus, and serpentine Hydra poised to strike Cancer. They made a game of it, seeing who could remember more of the sky’s tragedies. But no matter who won, they both lost; in the end, Varian had to leave. He had to be home at the villa, reachable at least by messenger. He could not spend a single night in Grant’s bed. Of all the pleasures he experienced at the Pile, Grant’s reluctance to let him go was the deepest of all. How had he earned it? It felt, for all the world, like forgiveness for what had happened all those years ago. But nothing had changed. Varian was still married to Eileen, had not intimated to her the smallest part of what was happening here. Every night, when Grant turned from saying goodnight to Varian, he reentered Katznelson’s sanctum, put on Katznelson’s pajamas, slept in his great carved bed. And by day he looked for Tobias, wherever he might be hiding in the great tangled rat’s nest that was southern France.

  * * *

  ________

  One of the hardest things to get used to, he wrote Eileen in a rare quiet moment, as a gray rain fell beyond the windows of his room, is the constant change in the cast of characters. You come to know a person well, and soon that person becomes indispensable. And you forget that he, too, is a refugee, and must leave at the nearest opportunity; or that she in is love with a person in danger, and must follow him when the tide sweeps him away. Over lunch à deux at the Dorade the previous afternoon, Miriam Davenport—he could scarcely believe it, refused to believe it still—had tendered her resignation. She had finally gotten an Italian transit visa; she would travel through Italy and on to Yugoslavia, where she would meet her fiancé, Rolf Treo, in Ljubljana. Rolf had been ill for months but was on the mend, she said; they expected to be married early in the new year. Once they got the necessary visas, they would make their way to Lisbon and depart from there to points west.

  “If he’s on the mend, why can’t he just wait until he’s recovered and meet you here?” Varian had said, grouchily.

  “You know why not. Unless we’re married, they’ll never give him an exit visa.”

  “And you truly want to marry him, this—art student?”

  “He’s not an art student anymore. He’s a professor at the Univerza v Ljubljani.”

  “Well, damn it to hell, Miriam!” He knew he was becoming ridiculous, knew he was talking too loud. “I can’t spare you. No one else on our team has your expertise.”

  “My expertise! Do you mean my two years of art-school training? What’s so special about that?”

  “You know,” Varian said. “I’m no artist. Neither is Hirschman or Mary Jayne. Our new recruits are bright, but they don’t know what you know. It’s not just training. You have a talent. The Bénédites have other talents, and so does Jean Gemähling. How are we supposed to go on without you? What happens the next time some genius turns up with a portfolio full of chickenscratch? Am I to just send him packing? And what about the person who comes with nothing at all? Who do we have who can do what you do?” He meant her ability to divine, from a few sketches hastily rendered down at the Vieux Port, whether a refugee had real ability, whether he was what he said he was, whether he merited the Committee’s attention.

  “Listen, Varian. About that.” Miriam lit another cigarette, the umpteenth in a chain. “Don’t you think it’s rather silly? And not just silly, wrong-headed, or maybe wrong-hearted? I mean, as a basis to decide whether someone lives or dies? Because, let’s be honest, that’s what it’ll come down to in a lot of these cases. Don’t you think a middling artist deserves a chance just as much as a great one does?”

  Varian sat back with his drink in his hand. “You know how hard it is to get the New York office to come up with cash. And every day they wire me, asking me to cut back our staff, to curb expenses. It’s hard to raise money, Frank Kingdon says. People still don’t believe, don’t fundamentally understand, what they read every day in the papers. Who am I supposed to cut from the payroll? Hirschman, who knows every black marketeer in Marseille and can manipulate them all to our ends? Oppy, who knows how to turn a dollar into ten? Leon Ball, who’ll be the only reason we get people over the border if the border ever opens again? And now you tell me I should just say damn the expense and save any Jacques or Jill who can hold a brush?”

  Miriam looked away as she discharged her ash into a ceramic trawler. “I don’t know how you’re supposed to do it,” she said. “I don’t have the answers. But I know that what we’ve been doing is wrong. It doesn’t feel humanitarian. It feels the opposite. Inhumane.”

  And hadn’t Grant said essentially the same thing a few nights earlier? They’d been speaking on the subject of race again, of Hitler’s relative valuation of lives. There was a terrible joke that had been making the rounds: When does Hitler consider a black man’s life more significant than a white man’s? When the black man and the white man are both your grandfathers. Don’t laugh too hard, Varian, Grant had said; lives have relative value in your camp, too.

  “You do understand,” he said now to Miriam. “You know why we do it. You can’t pretend you don’t. Artists save lives. So do outspoken champions of democracy. And journalists. And novelists.”

  “Yes, and they do so indiscriminately.”

  “What’s your game here, exactly? Are you trying to make me feel like a villain? Have I wronged you in some way?”

  “This has nothing to do with me. Or maybe yes, maybe it does—maybe I’ve been thinking about how I’m going to answer Rolf when I see him again and he asks what I did in Marseille. Deciding who lives and who dies on the basis of their talent. Is that what I should tell him? How am I going to think about all this ten years from now?”

  “You’ll come to the same conclusion you’ve already come to. You did what was necessary.”

  “No, I won’t. I’ll wonder what more I could have done. And so will you.”

  He called to the waiter for another drink. Despite all the wartime shortages, Marseille never seemed to run low on wine. “I have a responsibility to the people who came up with the list,” he said, lowering his voice. “I didn’t make those choices myself.”

  “No, but you’re making them now. And anyway, who’s to say what accomplished means? What about someone like Hannah Arendt, for example?”

  “Who’s Hannah Arendt?”

  “You haven’t heard of her, of course. No one has. She’s married to Heinrich Blücher, the German poet and philosopher, who’s not on your list either. He’s an accomplished enough academic, if something of a pedant. But her work is another thing altogether. She was a friend of Walter Benjamin’s. When I met Walter in Paris, he said I must read her at once. He had a single dog-eared copy of her dissertation—just a manuscript, which he’d paid someone to retype from the original—and he pressed it on me, with admonishments not to lose it. I’ll admit I wasn’t too anxious to read it. The subject was the treatment of love in Saint Augustin
e. A philosopher I don’t much admire. He’s the one, you know, who codified the idea of original sin, and pinned it squarely on the naked breast of Eve.”

  “Yes, yes, I know Saint Augustine,” Varian said, impatient.

  “Well, you don’t know Arendt on Augustine. She uses the old saint’s arguments against him. He tells us to disavow social connection as a source of meaning and look to God, but she argues that meaning comes only from connection with others. She’s writing that argument in the light of Hitler’s rise to power, and in opposition to it. Love, not hate, as the driving ethos behind political power. It’s nothing yet, just a dissertation. Not enough to get her past your New York gatekeepers. But Benjamin was of the opinion that she would set the world afire.”

  Varian laced his fingers. “Interesting that you should make this argument in light of the fact that you’re leaving us. If you’ve already decided to throw it all over, some would say you’ve got no right to question my decisions.”

  “Well, I don’t care if I’ve got the right or not! I’ve said what I meant to say.”

  “As you always do,” he said, tartly, though it was one of the things he admired most about her. “You have to know I don’t want to keep anyone out. You have to know I’d stay up all night every night for years on end if it meant saving just a few more.”

  “I do know. I’ve seen you at work. But there’s something seductive about sitting in a seat of power, isn’t there? Having the authority to judge?”

  Varian looked at her carefully, at the reflection of light in her clear, intelligent eyes, at the cross of her glinting braids, the headdress of an ancient warrior queen. “Do you think I want to judge?” he said. “Do you sincerely think that of me?”

  “It was your idea to save the artists and writers. Specifically them.”

  “My idea? Do I have to explain or defend my project to you? It wasn’t just a whim of mine. I wasn’t alone in thinking that the intellectual treasure of Europe shouldn’t be scattered or destroyed. The names on the list mean something. Every one. They mean something to me.”

  “Everyone means something to someone.”

  “In the absence of infinite resources, you have to choose. If this were the nineteenth century, we’d save Dostoyevsky, not Odoyevsky. Flaubert, not Mirbeau.”

  “If this were the nineteenth century, there would still be serfdom and slavery, and women wouldn’t have the right to vote.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” Varian balled up his napkin and threw it down. “What do you want me to do? Print money? Create time?”

  “Whatever it takes,” she said, and coughed, and gave him her tender, toothy grin.

  He wanted to walk out of the restaurant, out of Marseille, all the way to the border and over it. It was true, wasn’t it, that his position was impossible, even indefensible. If Miriam, who had been on the inside and certainly knew better, could still imply that perhaps he wasn’t doing enough, he had to consider the possibility that maybe he wasn’t. What had happened to the feeling he’d had a month earlier, that the very impossibility of the task was part of its attraction? Did he actually care less about saving human beings if those human beings couldn’t write a perfect novel or make an enduring painting? Would he wonder ten years from now what more he could have done?

  Miriam began to cough again: that hollow smoker’s hack that presaged consumption. Her skin flushed and she extracted a handkerchief from her bag. She was a few moments in composing herself. “Forgive me,” she said. “It’s these dreadful Gauloises.”

  “So you really plan to leave us for that sickly Slav?”

  “I really do,” Miriam said, and leaned over the table. “I haven’t gotten laid in nine months!” She hooted with glee. “Mary Jayne thinks I’m mad. Sleep with old Beaver, she says! He adores you! Rolf will never know. But I’ll know. You know?”

  Varian laughed. He reached across the table and took her hand. “Nine months!” he said. “If only I’d known. No girl should have to suffer that way. I might have swayed you, don’t you think?”

  “You,” she said, narrowing her eyes at him. “You. If anyone could have, maybe it would’ve been you.” Her gaze was steady, her tone reflective; her hand in Varian’s felt charged with nervous energy. “But it couldn’t have been you, could it?”

  He sat silent, looking at her. She was right, for countless reasons; it couldn’t have been. But what was she asking of him, what did she want him to say? Did she want him to speak the words aloud? His head pounded with a dull internal pressure. Before him Miriam had turned an incandescent pink, all the way to the crest of her brow. Of course she and Mary Jayne knew about Grant; of course they saw what was going on. It was written on him stark as skywriting. Fortunately, the waiter arrived at that moment with the check, and Miriam withdrew her hand.

  16

  Revels

  It was Mary Jayne who proposed the farewell party for Miriam. She and Varian were sitting on the patio the next evening after dinner, watching shadows gather in the valley; Mary Jayne leaned against the stone railing, one espadrilled foot balanced on a patio chair. The party might take place on Saturday night, she said, before Miriam’s departure Monday. It would start with dinner for a few friends; then they’d open the doors to a larger group of guests. Miriam was to have a new dress and plenty of champagne and songs composed in her honor, and the dinner guests would be the area surrealists: Oscar Dominguez, Victor Brauner, Wifredo Lam, Jacques Hérold—perhaps even Chagall, who might be lured by the prospect of seeing Zilberman. And if they invited Bingham, and seated him next to Chagall, he could whisper in Chagall’s ear all night long about the prospect of emigration. Breton would play host; he liked the role of ringleader. And Mary Jayne herself would sponsor the occasion. It had been far too long, she said, since she’d thrown a proper party. She was not to be dissuaded.

  “I hate to provide the voice of reason,” Varian said, “but what are you planning to feed a dozen surrealists? Or does a surrealist dinner party not require actual food?”

  Mary Jayne said she would consult Madame Nouguet, the cook and housekeeper. “There are ways,” she said, mysteriously, though if there were, Varian suspected she would have had them only on hearsay; he’d heard her boast that she’d never so much as boiled water for tea. “Anyway, why have a house like this if you’re not going to throw parties in it? Otherwise, it’s like a musical instrument unplayed. A cake uneaten. A waste.”

  “Parties are showy,” Varian said. “We don’t want to attract official attention.”

  “We’ve got nothing to hide. The authorities know where Zilberman is. You lifted him from a police station, after all. And the police know where to find you if they want, even here at La Pomme. Throw a party and let them know you’re not afraid.”

  Varian searched her eyes. “But I am afraid, Mary Jayne. Aren’t you?”

  She slid her espadrille along the rail. “I used to be, I suppose. Most often when I was flying. I used to look down at the ground below and imagine what it might feel like to hit the dirt at a thousand miles an hour. Tchow! Instant death. Would it hurt?” She shrugged. “But we all have to die one way or another. In the meantime I mean to live.”

  “Right. But I also mean for my clients to live. In the biological sense.”

  “Sure. But they’ve also got to want to. Parties stave off despair.”

  At that moment Grant emerged from the house and crossed the patio to join them. “I couldn’t help overhearing,” he said. “Are we having a party?”

  “Miriam’s leaving, you know,” Mary Jayne said. “Don’t you think she deserves a fine send-off? But Varian says we’ll just attract attention.”

  “Let me have a word with Mr. Fry,” Grant said. “In our Crimson days, he was known to throw his own fine party now and again.”

  “All right,” Mary Jayne said. “Do your worst. Make him say yes, Grant. Miriam deserves it,
after all she’s done for the Centre.” She hopped down from her perch on the railing and went into the house, leaving a faint echo of Chanel No. 5 behind her.

  Varian watched her go, then turned his gaze on Grant. “I can’t throw a party, of course,” he said. “We have to keep a low profile.”

  “You can throw a party. I’ve seen you do it.”

  “You don’t think it’ll make a noise?”

  “What if it does?” Grant said. “Maybe it’ll make the right kind. People need to know you’re here. Clients, I mean. There are still dozens on your list who could be anywhere. Put the word out. Selectively, I mean. See who you draw. And if the police come too, treat them as guests. Make them complicit.”